1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information technology, and more particularly to a framework and tool for providing information technology design solutions.
2. Related Art
Today's information technology products and solutions are becoming increasingly complex and confusing. Customers and solution providers have more product and technology choices than ever before. This complexity will always increase as new products are added to the existing ones. A framework to guide users through these choices is needed. Just as a construction blueprint helps engineers and builders and a city plan helps city planners, an information technology framework can guide its users in building solutions.
Consider: SNA, DHCP, OC-3, TCP/IP, ATM, RS/6000*, FTP, CICS*, 5665-147, XPQR, FTAM, 10BaseFB. This short list of the acronyms is representative of the types of complexities that drive information technology industry insiders crazy. People who build information technology have to put together solutions that actually provide some useful function to the people with the checkbooks.
During the early 1990s, IBM developed a guide called the Networking Blueprint. In 1994 it evolved into the Open Blueprint structure as more standards were developed, the application layer was expanded, and the systems management backplane was added. The Open Blueprint structure is a guide that helps its users choose the technologies and products needed to create a solution. It is very similar to a construction blueprint in that it can help its users make intelligent choices about very complex technologies. It says where to put a particular function, how strong that function should be, and most importantly, it attempts to show how to connect those functions together. It does not contain specific product knowledge, nor does it guide its users in connecting multiple devices together to form a solution.
The IBM Open Blueprint structure 11 (see FIG. 1) has two dimensions: vertical and horizontal. The vertical dimension contains layers that model a device or piece of hardware. This is similar to the standard OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model. From top to bottom, the layers are: applications and application enabling services 12, distributed systems services 14, common transport semantics 16, transport services 18, subnetwork services 20, and physical network 22. The horizontal dimension contains the choices that can be made in each of the vertical dimensions. For example, the application enabling services layer 12 has choices of remote method invocation (RMI), Post Office Protocol (POP), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), or HyperText Transfer Protocol/HyperText Markup Language (HTTP/HTML). The transport services layer 18 (logical protocols related to software) has choices of SNA (Systems Network Architecture), TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), etc. The subnetwork services layer 20 (physical protocols related to hardware) has choices of: Ethernet, token ring, ATM (asynchronous transfer mode), etc. The physical network layer 22 has copper cabling, fiber, satellite, etc. These groupings allow the acronyms mentioned earlier to be categorized, so that users can make choices as to which function will be used in their solution. To build one facet of one device (to specify the functions that the device would perform in implementing the solution to a particular business need), the user would pick one function for each layer. For example, the user may want a device to run a CICS (Customer Information Control System) application using a TCP/IPtransport protocol over a token ring subnetwork protocol over a physical copper interface.
The Open Blueprint structure allows the user to make choices in each layer independently from the others. Historically, products were built that tied these layers together in a predetermined way. For example, IBM mainframe applications were accessed through a front-end processor that used a transport protocol of SNA over a subnetwork protocol of SDLC (Synchronous Data Link Control) over a physical copper V0.35 physical interface. Today, customers expect vendors to create solutions that allow the customer to choose each layer's value independently of the other layers' values. Customers demand a more open solution. The Open Blueprint structure does not guarantee that there is a specific product or set of products that the user can buy that would implement their choices. Just because a user chooses a set of functions does not mean that those functions will necessarily work together. Users usually try to get concurrence from their vendors that the products will work together and provide the advertised function in an integrated solution.
The basic stack of layers that makes up the Open Blueprint structure 11 is used to build individual devices. In order to build entire solutions of interconnected devices, there is a need to put the Open Blueprint structure into a framework that can expand the scope of the design process to include the entire solution. More detailed customer and product knowledge is needed to make solution design decisions. This customer knowledge is needed to allow a designer to build a solution that is specialized for an individual customer. The product knowledge is needed to allow the designer to be very granular in his or her choices of products (hardware, software, adapter cards, cables) that satisfy the customer's requirements.